


Coda

by absolutelyCancerous (cal1brations)



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Brothers, Evans brothers feelings galore to be found here, Other, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-08 03:43:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/756650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cal1brations/pseuds/absolutelyCancerous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Wes starts piano lessons when Soul is six years old.”</p>
<p>Before anything else, they were <i>brothers.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Coda

Wes starts piano lessons when Soul is six years old.

He doesn’t like it, he tells his younger sibling out of earshot of Mom and Dad while they sprawl out in the backyard; Soul remembers the smell of grass and often thinks of watching Wes’s lessons, trying to memorize how the keys sounded, what a chord was and what those silly pedals did. Soul _loves_ the piano, he’s too little to play it properly, which is why mom and dad won’t let him have lessons until he gets bigger, but Soul understands why Wes is uninterested.

Wes loves violins more than he loves _strawberry shortcake_ (which is an awful, terrible lot).

Several weeks later, Wes is quitting his piano lessons and a new instructor comes to their house, violin in-tow.

Soul takes his brother’s seat at the piano bench instead, although he has to wiggle and stretch a little to hit the pedals properly.

.

Soul watches Wes morph from screeching notes and unsure strokes to singing strings and languid sways of his bow. His fingers learn not to waver in their holds, and eventually Soul gets to snicker at the many stiff necks and shoulders Wes suffers; no one said being a prodigy was easy.

He likes hearing Wes play, he’s _good_. He doesn’t stand still like other violinists Soul has seen as competitions, rather, Wes moves his entire body as he plays, expressions dance on his face while he moves about, illustrating a story that isn’t able to be sung through a voice.

(Soul thinks the singers are very talented, too; as a small boy he always felt sorry for them, assuming how horrifyingly nerve-wracking using _your voice_ to compete would be. You can change instruments, but not the kind that are a part of your body, like vocal chords.)

Soul also watches from the audience often; he doesn’t win nearly as often as Wes does, and has only roped a first place one time, to which Wes got chosen to tour for the competition’s staff in several cities, so Wes still trumped him.

Wes often asks why Soul stays for the awards recitals if he knows he doesn’t place.

“I like watching you,” Soul says, because it’s true, he _loves_ to hear his brother play.

(No matter how much it makes the green-eyed monster snarl and spit inside Soul’s gut, makes him jealous and makes him feel bad about sitting in the loser seat, the one marked with a row number that can measure up to his number of losses as well.)

Wes always asks, anyway. Every time Soul answers, his big brother just smiles, sighs, and goes back to fiddling with his violin case. The trophy that Wes always wins sits between them in the back seat of the car, because it is almost big enough (sometimes, actually, _it_ _is_ ) to require a seatbelt.

Soul misses Wes’s piano lessons. He misses not wanting to cry as he reads over his evaluations, too.

.

Wes plays for one of the small-scale operas that perform at the college arts center one summer. Both brothers auditioned, but Soul was not chosen for the pianist—he lacked color and movement, the pieces he played were simply too _dark_.

Wes never brings up his practices with the opera company whatsoever around Soul. That is always Mom or Dad, either trying to scorn their younger son for not making it or simply not caring about the words that poured from their mouths—encouragements to Wes, scorn towards Soul.

He catches Soul scribbling out notes on the piano one afternoon after he’s home from practice, and asks what he’s doing.

“Trying to be like you,” Soul teases (truthfully), before hiding note-covered staff paper behind clean, blank ones. Wes asks to hear it, and nervously, Soul plays.

Wes is absolutely _enamored_ with his brother’s work.

“It’s perfect,” he says as Soul wrings his hands together, and Wes makes sure to throw a comforting arm around the kid’s shoulders—Soul is only two years younger than he is, but he’s already filling out from a lanky, boyish frame into firm, broad shoulders.

“Don’t change anything about it.”

Soul doesn’t.

He auditions to a voice studio with the very same piece, and when he is turned down for the work, he places the music into the deepest, darkest corner of his closet, where a stack of unloved music sits; even its master’s back turned upon it.

.

Wes watches his brother fade into a machine, watches him do nothing but exist, between schoolwork (from a home tutor, of course) and competitions, Soul does nothing but sit in his room, not even with the piano. Sometimes he lies outside in the backyard until his face is burned a summer-kissed red, and some days Wes joins him, when he’s not bustling around with his violin and his parents.

“Do you ever wish you didn’t get into music?” Soul asks, and it’s not upset or serious, really, it’s just words that tumble out of his mouth as he looks up at the clouds moving across a golden-turning sky.

“I can’t wish that—it’s my life.”

Soul nods, and puts his hands behind his head.

“What if you could do anything else in the world?”

“I don’t think I’d give up music.”

Wes turns to look at his brother. Soul’s keeping secrets, he can tell merely by the fact he’s chewing on the inside of his lip.

.

Soul tells him about this academy, for weapons.

Soul also shows him that he can _morph_ into a weapon, a scythe. With a jagged, red-black blade that’s so unbelievably **Soul** , Wes smiles fondly when it’s presented to him. He compliments him, but Soul is in his own world, un-listening.

They sit together for awhile, and Soul keeps looking at his hands. Wes asks him if he’s thought a good deal about all this, and Soul just shrugs, scrubs his hands over his face and sighs, because he explains that he doesn’t know what he can really do at this point.

“People are going to know you.”

“I’ll go by something else, then.”

Wes smiles. His little brother was always the clever sleuth, stealing snacks in the kitchen without getting caught, helping Wes himself step out at night to meet with girls he wasn’t exactly supposed to be seeing in the first place.

“Mom and Dad are going to pitch a fit, you know,” Wes begins, but Soul shakes his head.

“Mom and Dad aren’t going to _know_.”

Wes doesn’t know what to say to that, although Soul is looking at him like he always does when he needs an answer; he can’t exactly tell him to shoot for the stars—he doesn’t _want_ his little brother leaving to a place he’s never even heard of, he wants him home and safe, playing piano in the parlor and enjoying his music just as much as Wes himself enjoys it—

He’s not sure how to handle the thought of not hearing Soul’s music anymore.

He’s not sure how to handle the thought of not seeing _Soul_ anymore. No more fighting with him over who gets shotgun in the car, no more helping him do his tie and vice versa, no more “this is my little brother, Soul” to the kind ladies who ask.

Wes worries for Soul. For him to be alone, stranded in a sea of strangers who might not, can’t possibly, see Soul for the ingenious, fantastic boy he is; they never knew him for his first eight years of life, hearing him lisp around those god-awful teeth that made speech nearly impossible, nor do they know he’s terribly self-conscious, though not shy. It’s just job as a brother to worry, and Wes feels uncomfortable with the knowledge Soul plans on up and leaving without Wes to protect and comfort him.

But _he doesn’t know what to say_ , so he nods, and watches Soul nibble on his nails in contemplation. They’re distant now, unlike the two young boys who used to lie in the grass and play hide and seek. They’re two different people, one full of guilt for his talents, and the other full of hatred for said talents.

Soul could never _hate_ him, right?

.

One morning, Wes wakes up to absolute chaos.

Mom is screaming in tears and Dad is calling the police, yelling that _he’s only a thirteen year-old boy, white hair, and Evans for God’s sake, how could no one have seen him, he_ has _to be out there!_

Wes does not join in the hysterics. He merely goes to grab a box of cereal from the cabinet—his favorite, obviously some god-awful sugary thing Soul had coxed him into enjoying. He pours out some into a bowl, and catches a piece of paper in his sugary meal. Unfolding it, it’s a single word, in writing Wes could never mistake.

_Thanks_.

He nods, and continues his breakfast in a household of hell.

.

Soul signs his name.

_Soul Eater_.


End file.
